GitLab raises $20M Series C, adds Matt Mullenweg to board

2017-10-10 | Samir Saberi

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Gitlab, a collaboration and DevOps platform has raised a $20 million Series C round led by GV, the venture arm of Alphabet. Founded in Utrecht in 2014 by Sytse Sijbrandij and Dmitriy Zaporozhets Gitlab, has since raised $45.6 million.

GitLab is currently in use by more than 100,000 organization as a git-based open source tool for self-hosting code repositories. Some notable clients include Ticketmaster, ING, NASDAQ, Sony, VMWare and Intel.

But the company has expanded in offering its clients DevOps solutions such as view, test, release automation and application monitoring tools. It essentially supports developers to work on the same software at the same time, providing an easy way to manage and merge all the different changes coming in. The startup plans to invest the capital raised to further this approach of serving the complete ‘DevOps Lifecycle’ end-to-end.

Matt Mullenweg

In addition to the funding, the company announced yesterday also the addition of famed WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to its board.

“GitLab’s powerful momentum and scaling have a lot of parallels to Automattic and WordPress in their early days,” said Matt. “WordPress had to battle a lot of competitors, and ultimately came out on top as a successful company on an open source business model. I hope to help GitLab achieve the same triumph. Fundamentally, I want to help create the kind of internet that I want to live in and I want my children to live in, one that reaches a global audience and one that is able to make a difference.”

The biggest ‘competitors’ of Gitlab are Github (valued at $2 billion) and Atlassian’s BitBucket product. Core difference between Gitlab en Github is that the former provides git-based solutions on premise as Gitlab’s CEO voiced previously in a StartupJuncture interview. Today, GitLab claims that it controls two-thirds of the market for “self-hosted git,” attesting its popularity.

“With this funding, the support of our new board members and the day to day talent of our expanded leadership team, GitLab will become the first solution that supports the complete DevOps lifecycle,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told Business Insider about the new round of funding.

“The Fortune 500 is racing to build world-class software development organizations that mirror the speed, productivity, and quality of the largest tech companies. As these organizations strive to produce high-quality code at scale, they will need best-in-class tools and platforms. GitLab’s platform accelerates the development process with an emphasis on collaboration and automation,” said Dave Munichiello, GV General Partner, in a statement about the investment. “GitLab’s hybrid, multi-cloud solution is loved by developers, and is seeing tremendous traction in the field.”

Entrepreneur | Co-founder @StartupsAnoniem, @StartupJuncture | Partner @StartupDelta | Node1| Tech Blogger| Samir is interested in and loves to work with crazy, dissident, rebel startups that challenge the status quo to make things better. Drop him a line at samir[at]startupjuncture[.]com